Linking corporate social responsibility to corporate reputation: a study on understanding behavioral consequences

In today's highly competitive market environment, firms need to meet the expectations of multiple stakeholders and compete for reputational status. In this context, corporate reputation (hereafter, CR) plays a very specific role because stakeholders make their decisions based on the reputational status of the firm in question. Given the importance of CR as an important intangible asset that firms should carefully manage, understanding its antecedents and consequences is of strategic importance. Examining CR from a multi-stakeholder perspective, this study aims to investigate first the effect that corporate social responsibility (hereafter, CSR) has on CR as an antecedent and then the effects that CR has on the behaviors of customers, employees, and investors as different stakeholder groups. To test the hypothesized relationships, an online questionnaire is conducted to a convenience sample of 172 respondents and the results are computed using multiple regression analyses. The results confirm not only that as an antecedent, CSR has a strong positive effect on CR but also that CR has a strong positive effect on the behaviors of customers, employees, and investors.